Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7

PRICE: $369 • URL: WWW.GIGABYTE.COM.AU

With the release of Intel’s new Skylake CPU, aka the 6th Gen Core processor, along came a brand new motherboard chipset, the Z170. While Skylake turned out to be a disappointment for gamers, Z170 brought a raft of new features that made it a worthwhile upgrade. Most important of all was the introduction of more PCI Express lanes, which had become a valuable commodity in this day and age of high-speed SSDs. It turns out that Z170 also had a hidden feature that Intel doesn’t want you to know about – it can be used to overclock non-K model CPUs by adjusting their base clock. You can read last issue of PCPP to see how we got a $270 chip to run at 4.32GHz using this method, but don’t tell Intel ;)

When Z170 debuted, I conducted a mega-roundup of boards based on this chipset, and found Gigabyte’s snazzy Z170XGaming 7 to be the best bang for your premium buck. As a bit of an audiophile, I truly adored the high-end Creative onboard audio, which came with Gigabyte’s unique OP-AMP feature, allowing the user to swap out the amps for different sounding versions. It also had plenty of PCIe slots along with twin Ethernet, one of which was powered by Killer. I later tested Killer’s networking software, and concluded that it’s great if you need to share your home connection with gaming, downloading and streaming. HDMI 2.0 out was another unique inclusion, while at the time the exclusive use of Intel’s Alpine Ridge controller gave this board the best range of USB 3.1 and 3.0 ports on the market. Sure, it cost $369, but when it comes this feature packed, it’s not hard to justify spending a little more – as I did when it became the home of my new i5 6600K, which has since been purring along at 4.5GHz for over six months without issue.